One day, when he had basted me most unmercifully, I said to him, “I also would ask you one thing, Hob, and if you tell me without sleeping on it, I will give you the silver buckle of my belt.”
“Say on,” said he, casting an eager eye at the waist-leather which Jean Gordon had sent me.
“Wherein have I the advantage over the leopard?” I asked him.
He thought it over most profoundly.
“I give it up,” he said at last. “I do not know.”
“Why,” said I, as if it had been the simplest thing, “because when I play back-sword with you I can change my spots and Scripture declares that the leopard cannot.”
This he understood not at the time, but the next Sabbath morning it came upon him in the time of worship in the kitchen, and in the midst of the solemnity he laughed aloud, whereat my father, much incensed, asked him what ailed him and if his wits had suddenly taken leave of him.
“It was our Quintin,” dithered Hob, tremulously trying to command his midriff; “he told me that when I played back-sword with him he could change his spots and that the leopard could not.”
“When said he that?” asked my father, with cold suspicion, for I had been sitting demure as a gib cat at his own elbow.
“Last Monday in the gloaming, when we were playing at back-sword in the barn,” said Hob.